Hannah Maybank’s paintings employ the landscape as a motif to investigate what paint can do in both a physical and illusory sense. She has developed and modified a process of making paintings through layering areas of latex in between numerous layers of flat acrylic colour.

Starting out as a series of black calligraphic-like ink drawings, the composition of each painting is pre-determined by a series of carefully worked, to-scale line drawings on layers of tracing paper. This multi-layered and exactly registered set of drawings is then transferred to the surface of the painting at their pre-designated stage. Success or failure is often granted at the final stages of the making of each piece. Alongside the rigidity of the carefully worked, drawn composition, chaos and the unpredictability of materials come into play. Construction and destruction work hand in hand as the surface is ripped, ruptured and sliced and the picture revealed.

Echoing the process of the acrylic and latex paintings, through her series of watercolours, Maybank uses the rigidity of pencil outline with the un-reined bursts of coloured washes. Presence and absence is once more explored as the heavily pigmented blooms sit robustly amidst the empty fragility of the stems and buds.

Whether through the visceral paintings, energetic ink drawings or ephemeral watercolours, her use of nature parallels the cycles within life: the weight of what has been and what is yet to come.